Languages

Janice Gross Stein on Smugness

Janice Gross Stein, Director of the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto

Interviewed on September 16, 2014 by Monica Pohlmann.

Pohlmann: What keeps you awake at night?

Stein: Canadians aren’t change leaders. We’re deeply, deeply risk averse. If you give us a choice, we prefer the status quo, because we think it’s less risky. What we don’t understand is the cost of inaction. Most of our public sector institutions are buried in process. In the last year, minute scandals about minute amounts of money have consumed the public agenda. It’s all about the evaluation of process as opposed to a conversation about what we want to accomplish together. We don’t use process to enable, we use it to obstruct. Process also drives you to the middle. If you’re unwilling to offend anybody, you don’t get imaginative, innovative solutions. Ultimately, that approach could degrade our quality of life.

The corporate sector is the least risk averse. It has a better-developed sense of risk and understands that the status quo is not sustainable. If you look at where real environmental leadership is coming from in this country, it’s the private sector—the insurance industry and the energy sector. As soon as the insurance industry starts to create a marketplace around environmental risk, we’re going to move on this issue much more quickly than we are now. The energy sector is the one saying that we need environmentally responsible policy, because it’s overwhelmingly in their interest.

We need more entrepreneurial spirit in this country, most of all in the public and not-for-profit sectors. We have to look beyond government for doers. The not-for-profit sector is getting more and more entrepreneurial all the time. Part of what is driving its innovative activities is that there is so little money and so much ambition. Under these circumstances, you’re driven to find new ways to do things. The good news is that we have a greater capacity for self-organization in this country than we give ourselves credit for.

Pohlmann: What energizes you?

Stein: Young people! I’ve spent my life working with young people, and this is the most adventurous, clear-eyed, hard-nosed generation I’ve met. They depend on themselves, are single-minded in their desire to get the best skills, have a global view, and are not risk averse. Our students in the Munk School of Global Affairs are starting start-ups! They have the capacity and the confidence to move out from under the big, cumbersome institutions.

Pohlmann: If things turn out badly over the next 20 years, what would have happened?

Stein: We would have failed to keep our young people. They will go where the work is interesting and challenging, and where they can contribute. That will be a huge loss. If we don’t reorient our institutions to make them hospitable to members of this generation, they will just walk right around them and do other things. Our institutions will atrophy, because they won’t have people to shake things up and say, no, we’re not going to do it this way anymore.

We will also fail if we do not recover from our terminal illness of smugness and self-satisfaction. Otherwise, we are not going to push ourselves hard enough and will ultimately slide into mind-numbing mediocrity. The rest of the world is changing faster than we are. Look at what China was 50 years ago and what China is today. Unimaginable! Look at the social experiments going on in Brazil. We have a lot to learn. What’s missing here is urgency. Comfort is our biggest enemy. The leaders of our established institutions have to wake up and understand what is going on in the world.

Pohlmann: If you could ask a clairvoyant anything about Canada’s future, what would you want to know?

Stein: Will we be able to leverage the enormous intelligence and creativity we have in this country to enrich the quality of innovation? My colleagues and I are looking at what policies governments and the private sector can use to enhance the benefits of innovation as you go through the innovation frontier. The question of who benefits from innovation and who doesn’t is really going to matter. In some innovative societies, the benefits of innovation are evenly distributed, and in some societies, they’re not. If, in our society, those who innovate are hugely rewarded but those who are outside of that process are hugely disadvantaged, we will not have the kind of Canada that we want. And how can you involve minorities, including young Aboriginal people, in a vibrant innovation economy and society? These are important policy questions.

Pohlmann: What important decisions does Canada have to make?

Stein: We have to make some hard decisions about who we are going to be and what we’re going to do in the world. We are a small country and we cannot do everything. In the attempt, we weaken our impact everywhere we go. We have to have this debate, and in the process, we will make Canadians proud instead of angry.

We are wholly dependant on immigration for our future. We’re very good at it, but again, there’s a risk of smugness. We know from good research that our big cities are not doing as well in opening doors to employment and advancement to immigrants as they were two decades ago. Yet if we’re going to thrive, we have to attract even more immigrants than we have in the past. To many people around the world, we are the most attractive country to come to. We have to live up to that record.

From 1870 to 1996, more than 150,000 First Nations, Métis, and Inuit children were placed in residential schools and forbidden to speak their language and practice their culture. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) estimates there are 80,000 former students living today, and that the ongoing impact of residential schools are a major contributor to challenges facing modern Aboriginal populations.

Canada’s TRC is one of many commissions worldwide to undertake revealing and resolving past wrongdoings, mostly by governments. Other examples include:

South Africa

In 1996, President Nelson Mandela authorized a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to study the effects of apartheid in South Africa. The commission allowed victims of human rights violations to give statements about their experiences, but also allowed perpetrators of violence to request amnesty from criminal prosecution.

Argentina

The National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons, initiated in 1983, investigated human rights violations, including 30,000 forced disappearances, committed during the Dirty War.

Guatemala

The Historical Clarification Commission was created in 1994 in an effort to reconcile Guatemala after a 36-year civil war. The commission issued a report in 1999 which estimated that more 200,000 people were killed or disappeared as a result of the conflict.

In June, the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission released 94 “calls to action” to “redress the legacy of residential schools and advance the process of Canadian reconciliation.”

The scope of recommendations range from child welfare to education to Indigenous language rights, and has recommendations targeted for private and public spheres of Canadian life alike. The document calls upon law schools in Canada to require all students to take a course in Aboriginal people and the law, for example. Notably, the document calls upon the federal government to appoint a public inquiry into the causes of, and remedies for, the disproportionate victimization of Aboriginal women and girls.

Canada’s employment statistics are much better now than they were 20 years ago. In 2012 for example, 61.8% of working-age Canadians were employed as opposed to 58.7% in 1995. The unemployment rate has gone down from 9.5% in 1995 to 6.8% in 2014. Youth unemployment has gone down too, from 16.1% to 13.5% in the same time period. The outlier in these trends is labour force participation, or the amount of working-age Canadians who are either employed, or unemployed and looking for work. Right now, participation is at the lowest rate since the year 2000, mainly because the “baby-boomer” generation is moving towards retirement. Read more about that here.

Housing preferences among Millennials, however, tend towards smaller, higher density housing close to activities, signs that changing economic realities and the generation shift will create more demand for housing in compact, walkable neighbourhoods.

Belfry-Munroe suspects that youth disinterest has to do with political parties. “There’s been a lack of engagement one-on-one with people since the 1970s, and a greater focus on mass media and now things like social media,” says Belfry-Munroe. “The other thing is that parties have become uncool,” she continues, “and I think that getting excited about the election without parties is like getting excited about the World Series without the teams. If you weren’t excited about the Blue Jays, you would not be concerned about the World Series.”

To extend this analogy, young Canadians currently aren’t even interested in baseball. What could work to change this would be getting other types of fans — soccer, golf, darts, you name it — engaged in baseball due to their passion for sports in general. Politically, this is the bridge that is missing for youth. The Blue Jays don’t matter if youth are removed from sports. Similarly, political parties and leaders would have little relevance if youth are removed from electoral politics.

“The generational effect is even larger [than the life cycle effect]. At the same age, turnout is 3 or 4 points lower among baby boomers than it was among pre-baby boomers, 10 points lower among generation X than it was among baby boomers, and another 10 points lower among the most recent generation than it was among generation X at the same age.”

— An excerpt from “Why Was Turnout So Low?” in Anatomy of a Liberal Victory by Andre Blais, Elisabeth Gidengil, Richard Nadeau and Neil Nevitte.

Rock The Vote also published a Youth Voter Strategy Report in 2007 that compiled many scholarly findings on this subject. You can find that here.

According to Elections Canada, “people are less likely to cast a ballot if they feel they have no influence over government actions, do not feel voting is an essential civic act, or do not feel the election is competitive enough to make their votes matter to the outcome, either at the national or the local constituency level.” Read more here.

The trend of youth voter disengagement persists across much of the developed world. According to the Economist, for example, in 2010 just 44 per cent of people aged 18 to 24 voted in Britain’s general election compared to 76% of those aged 65 and over. America saw its lowest voter turnout ever in its 2014 midterm elections, where just 19.9 per cent of young people voted, compared to an overall turnout rate of 36.4 per cent. This trend tends to change, however, when charismatic politicians reach out to youth. According to Politico, Barack Obama would have lost the 2012 American presidential election without youth voting — overwhelmingly for him. Read more here.